Category: Guides

For new and ongoing conflicts across the world, the need to document their impact on civilians and the environment upon which they depend is encouraging the development of new research tools and methodologies. Traditional approaches for monitoring environmental risks are notoriously reliant on field access for experts. But with civilians increasingly able to access…

This article was originally published on the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. As part of my previous post on gangs in Detroit, one thing had struck me: there are an awful lot of guns being waved around on social media. Shocker, I know. More importantly I began to wonder if there wasn’t a way to automatically identify when…

With the conflict in Syria soon to enter its fifth year, large parts of the country have been laid to waste by intense fighting, bombardment and shelling. Understandably, most of the focus has been on the fighting and the direct victims of armed violence, with rather less on other impacts and their consequences, particularly the environmental damage and pollution caused by the conflict.

Wix is a popular free website hosting platform, that has 73 million users across 180 countries (stats from Wix themselves). Recently while working on an investigation, I was spending time hunting around a website that is hosted on Wix and I discovered an interesting anomaly.

This article was originally published on the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. VICE News ran a story about a gang in Detroit, Michigan that was nabbed partly due to their use of social media. This of course caught my attention so I clicked the link to the indictment papers and began to have a read. I find court documents completely…

This article was originally published on the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. Lots of OSINT investigations involve looking at companies, their structure, and of course their directors. Just yesterday, CBC News here in Canada did a story about a wealthy family allegedly using tax havens as a means to avoid paying taxes. As part of the news story…

As verification and open source investigation techniques and methodologies have been developed over the last few years various tools and platforms have been used to access the information that makes this kind of work possible. This includes pre-existing tools such as Google Earth and new tools developed over the last few years. In this article…

Imagine you are researching an anonymous website with no clues as to its authorship. A single string of code could link that site to another, which perhaps reveals the identity of the owner. With the right tools, this information can be surprisingly easy to uncover. Site fingerprinting with embedded code Google Analytics is a popular…

This was originally posted to the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. There is a very cool game called Her Story. The premise is that you are a cop sitting in front of a 1990s-era computer system that enables you to punch keywords in to view videos about a murder case. When you punch in a keyword, there are…

This article was originally posted to the AutomatingOSINT.com blog. Recently I was listening to an episode of the Freakonomics podcast titled, “Making Sex Offenders Pay – And Pay and Pay” which you can listen tohere. The premise behind the episode was that sex offenders are a bit unique in how they are punished by the…